Galia Oz's demagogic and narcissistic book proves she's her father's true literary heiress   30%

The book Amos Oz’s daughter wrote about his abuse of her as a child is causing shock waves, with many relating to it as the truth, not a literary work. It is a deceptive and unbalanced effort by an entitled person

Coroner: Gabby Petito strangled 3-4 weeks before body found  

'Nothing is obvious in a case like this,' the coroner added.

The mysterious surge of North Koreas currency   -12%

In normal economies, currencies weaken in times of difficulty, but something counter-intuitive is happening in North Korea: the won is surging just as things are getting worse.

Unnamed Myanmar photographer, veteran reporters win Bayeux Award   6%

The prestigious Bayeux War Correspondents' Awards on Saturday honoured work by a range of international journalists including several veteran reporters and - for the first time - an unnamed Myanmar photographer.

Sally Rooney wont let her new novel be published by Israeli publisher   12%

The Hebrew-language publisher of Rooney’s first two books said last month that the author won’t allow her new book to be published in Hebrew due to her BDS support

Albert J. Raboteau, Who Transformed Black Religious Studies, Dies at 78  

Working in the 1970s and ’80s, his scholarship helped to cement African-American studies as an academic discipline.

Ozymandias 2  

I met a traveller from an antique land,
who said: “Give me 40 million dollars.
I’m resurrecting my imploded multimedia empire.
And this time I’m calling it Shattered Visage Media.
Or no, wait—Trunkless Legs of Stone News Network.”

“Listen,” I answered him. “Don’t you think
that by naming your company after Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias,’
a poem about hubris, transience, et cetera,
you’re sort of—I dunno—asking for it?”

“Dolt,” he said. “You don’t understand branding.
Nothing means anything these days.
It’s all about influence and disruption.
So what you want is words
that have that special leftover whiff of meaning
but really mean nothing at all.”

“Got it,” I said.
“That’s actually pretty funny.”
He left me then. And in the sand across the city line
all the ghosts shook their chains like money.

Paul McCartney: John Lennon was responsible for Beatles break-up   9%

Paul McCartney has revisited the break-up of The Beatles, flatly disputing the suggestion that he was responsible for the group’s demise.Speaking on an episode of BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life that is scheduled for broadcast on October 23, McCartney said it was John Lennon who wanted to disband The Beatles.“I didn’t instigate the split,” McCartney said. “That was our Johnny.’’The band’s fans have long debated who was responsible for the break-up, with many blaming McCartney. But McCartney…

MCD schools working to improve teaching learning outcomes  

From her self-quarantine in London, Claudia Roden shares beloved Passover recipes   11%

For the first time in her life, the famed food researcher and cookbook writer will be celebrating Passover alone. Roden talks about preserving the routine during an epidemic and offers simple home recipes for the seder

Will our pets suffer when we go back to work? We ask the expert   35%

Animal behaviour specialist Ryan Neile on how to get pets used to not being able to sit on our laps all day

Like many other Britons – a whopping 3.2 million to be precise – I welcomed a pet into my home during the pandemic. Since then, wherever I go in the house, my cat is sure to follow: she joins me on Zoom calls and even at dinner, taking her seat on the spare chair. But as more employees return to places of work, how will their pets be affected? And will they ever forgive us for leaving them? I spoke to Ryan Neile, head of behaviour at animal charity Blue Cross.

Hi Ryan! As I was leaving for work the other day, I saw my cat staring at me intensely from the window. Was that a look of betrayal in her eyes?
I don’t think cats feel betrayal per se, but they can form really strong attachments.

Truth-telling and a path to healing   35%

The Walnut Street Bridge in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was the site of a horrendous lynching in 1906. A new memorial hopes to tell the full story.

Shredded Banksy artwork Love is in the Bin sells for record US$25.4 million   33%

A work by British street artist Banksy that sensationally self-shredded just after it sold at auction three years ago fetched almost £18.6 million (US$25.4 million) on Thursday – a record for the artist, and close to 20 times its pre-shredded price.Love is in the Bin was offered by Sotheby’s in London, with a presale estimate of £4 million to £6 million.After a 10-minute bidding war involving nine bidders in the saleroom, online and by phone, it sold for three times the high estimate. The sale…

Africa: Hungary Fans Misbehave - Senegal and Morocco Finish At the Summit of World Cup Qualifying Groups   25%

[Daily Maverick] The latest instalment of the international break is over, with some teams booking their tickets to Qatar 2022 and others inching ever so close.

Ravneet Gills recipe for malted walnut and chocolate chip breakfast loaf | The sweet spot   43%

A slice of this nutty sweet loaf is begging for a grill and a wad of farmhouse butter

This loaf is designed to be eaten sliced, griddled and generously buttered with good-quality salted stuff. It stands up really well on its own, but also works really nicely topped with nut butter and sliced banana. It’s important that the walnuts are roasted beforehand, because that helps improve their texture inside the bread. Add the mix after the first prove and feel free to switch the milk chocolate for dark or the walnuts for another nut, if you prefer.

UK readers: click to buy these ingredients from Ocado

Jerusalem artist spotlights Israelis and Palestinians who were burned alive  

A series of works, jolting in their simplicity, center on the names of eight Israelis and Palestinians who burned themselves to death or were burned alive

Amazon to allow employees to work remotely indefinitely   3%

The new policy is a change from Amazon’s previous expectation that most employees would need to be in the office at least three days a week when offices reopen.

The post Amazon to allow employees to work remotely indefinitely appeared first on Boston.com.

Surprised that Ivanka was almost head of the World Bank? You shouldnt be | Arwa Mahdawi   10%

Donald Trump wanting his daughter to have the top job at the World Bank is no great surprise. What intrigues me is the thought of Steven Mnuchin blocking it

It’s no secret that Donald Trump has something of a soft spot for his eldest daughter, Ivanka. He’s constantly tooting her horn and gushing over her talents. Not only does Ivanka have a “very nice figure”, Trump has boasted, but “she’s very good with numbers”. She’s so good at all that numbers stuff that the former president even considered her for the top job at the World Bank in 2019. And that wasn’t just a fleeting fantasy, either; according to a recent report by the Intercept, Ivanka’s nomination for World Bank president “came incredibly close to happening”. The reason it didn’t is that Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, intervened. Which, by the way is a rather different story from the one Ivanka tells. The former first daughter has said she passed on the job because she was very happy with the high-powered White House position she’d appointed herself to.

I can’t say I’m surprised that Ivanka was a stone’s throw away from a(nother) prestigious job she was laughably unqualified for. What does intrigue me is why Mnuchin might have blocked her nomination. Trump has a knack of surrounding himself with sycophants who do his bidding; what could have prompted Mnuchin to break ranks? Could it possibly be that the guy finds brazen nepotism distasteful? Alas, it seems unlikely, considering he’s a product of it himself. Mnuchin’s first job out of Yale was at Goldman Sachs, where his dad just happened to be a general partner. According to a New York magazine profile, Mnuchin’s colleagues at Goldman Sachs didn’t consider him “especially book smart”, but that didn’t stop him becoming partner himself. The same profile notes that his elevation to partner came at the expense of an African American trader from a working-class background who struck one colleague as being “much smarter than Steven” and having “accomplished a lot more”. I don’t know how fair that profile is, but I’d bet both my kidneys that Mnuchin isn’t someone who stays awake at night fretting about nepotism.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

How does each zodiac sign deal with anger   -27%

Anger management is something that not everyone is good at. In fact with the growing work pressure and changing dynamics in our households due to the pandemic, the situation has gotten worse. But how does everyone deal with it? Find out how each zodiac sign shows his/her anger according to an astrologer.

The Highs and Lows of Finding Love on the Spectrum   -13%

Not surprisingly, the romantic lives of autistic adults are just like those of neurotypical adults: never easy.

What We Lost When Gannett Came to Town   11%

Photographs by KC McGinnis

The grain elevator exploded on a cool April morning in 1987, six years before I was born. My father was testing a clay sample in a lab two miles away when suddenly the dial jumped. He ran outside, thinking that a car had smashed into the building. My mother, doing yard work at home, assumed that the nearby ammunition plant was testing a new explosive.

Dale Alison saw the blast up close. He was 32 years old, and it was his first day as the city editor of The Hawk Eye, a newspaper in Burlington, Iowa. From the front door of the office, he saw the train tracks outside ripple, and the air seemed to vibrate and sway. Then the windows of the newsroom blew out. Alison and his colleagues ducked under their desks, and a few looked out to see a plume of black smoke blocking the sky. The 12-story grain-storage facility—a longtime fixture on Burlington’s riverfront—was wrapped in orange flames.

Alison started shouting out assignments. Matt Gallo should head to the hospital; Susan Fisher and Mike Sweet should drive downtown for man-on-the-street interviews; Steve Delaney, Tony Miller, and the photographers should go straight to the scene. Within the hour, firefighters evacuated the newsroom (train cars containing anhydrous ammonia were parked perilously close) and everyone regrouped at a nearby dive bar. Reporters made calls from the payphone and scrawled their stories on reams of paper someone had nabbed from an old typewriter shop. Photographers developed their film in a bathtub at someone’s house on the northwest side of town.

By late afternoon, the newsroom had reopened, and the presses were rolling. Burlingtonians had their papers by 8 p.m., just three hours behind schedule, complete with a full-size photo of the fireball and aerial images from the scene. The blast had injured some workers, but miraculously no one died. It had shattered hundreds of windows downtown and sank a nearby barge.

Even now, veteran Hawk Eye staffers will tell you that the grain-elevator explosion was a career highlight. It gave them the kind of thrill that all reporters crave. But there was also a real sense of ownership to the story: This was Burlington’s disaster—an event with an immediate impact. There was no question that The Hawk Eye would cover it from every possible angle.

Throughout the next year, the newspaper published a series of follow-up stories, including investigations into the explosion’s cause (a bearing had overheated and ignited a buildup of grain dust) and the company’s safety standards. The blast had been just the latest in a string of elevator fires in the Midwest, and the paper’s business editor, Steve Delaney, chased the story for months. By the end of the year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had announced new safety requirements for grain elevators.

For the people of southeastern Iowa, knowing that The Hawk Eye was investigating this fiasco was a source of comfort. The paper’s reliable attention made us feel like our little part of Iowa mattered and that we did, too. This is what The Hawk Eye gave us. Back then, we took it for granted.

I grew up outside Burlington, 15 miles west on Highway 34, past alternating corn and soybean fields and past the 19,000-acre Iowa Army Ammunition Plant. But Burlington was my community—home to the nearest supermarket, the mall, the movie theater—and The Hawk Eye was how we kept up: It’s where I looked for summer jobs, how my mother and I tracked down weekend tag sales, how we heard which new stores and restaurants were coming to town. The paper was where we first learned that my close friend’s father had died in a Mississippi water-skiing accident. It was where my high-school Girl Scout troop got a half-page spread our senior year.

The Hawk Eye was never perfect. Readers complained about typos or misspellings. Conservatives in town called it a liberal rag, and some lefties didn’t think it was progressive enough. But all the staffers at the paper lived in the area—you could call the editor on his landline and complain about a story, and you could confront Mike Sweet about his latest column in the produce section at Hy-Vee. People often did. And even The Hawk Eye’s most passionate detractors would still cut out the articles about their granddaughter’s softball team and stick them on the fridge.

The Hawk Eye isn’t dead yet, which sets it apart from many other local newspapers in America. Its staff, now down to three overstretched news reporters, still produces a print edition six days a week. But the paper is dying. Its pages are smaller than they used to be, and there are fewer of them. Even so, wide margins and large fonts are used to fill space. The paper is laid out by a remote design team and printed 100 miles away in Peoria, Illinois; if a reader doesn’t get her paper in the morning, she is instructed to dial a number that will connect her to a call center in the Philippines. Obituaries used to be free; now, when your uncle dies, you have to pay to publish a write-up.

These days, most of The Hawk Eye’s articles are ripped from other Gannett-owned Iowa publications, such as The Des Moines Register and the Ames Tribune, written for a readership three hours away. The Opinion section, once an arena for local columnists and letter writers to spar over the merits and morals of riverboat gambling and railroad jobs moving to Topeka, is dominated by syndicated national columnists.

[Read: The coronavirus is killing local news]

By now, we know what happens when a community loses its newspaper. People tend to participate less often in municipal elections, and those elections are less competitive. Corruption goes unchecked, and costs sometimes go up for town governments. Disinformation becomes the norm, as people start to get their facts mainly from social media. But the decline of The Hawk Eye has also revealed a quieter, less quantifiable change.

When people lament the decline of small newspapers, they tend to emphasize the most important stories that will go uncovered: political corruption, school-board scandals, zoning-board hearings, police misconduct. They are right to worry about that. But often overlooked are the more quotidian stories, the ones that disappear first when a paper loses resources: stories about the annual Teddy Bear Picnic at Crapo Park, the town-hall meeting about the new swimming-pool design, and the tractor games during the Denmark Heritage Days.

These stories are the connective tissue of a community; they introduce people to their neighbors, and they encourage readers to listen to and empathize with one another. When that tissue disintegrates, something vital rots away. We don’t often stop to ponder the way that a newspaper’s collapse makes people feel: less connected, more alone. As local news crumbles, so does our tether to one another.

As a teenager, I read the newspaper occasionally, but not like my dad, who practically absorbed it every morning with his coffee and Raisin Bran. One of my earliest memories is of him sitting on the couch holding the newspaper, and me, knocking on the front page like a door: Attention, please. My friends and I got used to Hawk Eye reporters milling around, documenting our softball games and school musicals—there was the writer with the beard, the photographer with the ponytail. And every four years, when the men who wanted to be president rolled into town, Hawk Eye reporters asked us what we thought of them. The newspaper was omnipresent; it had been for nearly 200 years.

The Hawk Eye is considered the oldest newspaper in the state, but technically, it began as two separate ones. The Wisconsin Territorial Gazette and the Burlington Hawk-Eye were founded in the mid-19th century by a pair of bitter political rivals. The delicate yellowed pages of those early editions contain stories about area Whig conventions and ads for newfangled steel plows. During the Great Depression the two papers became one: the Burlington Hawk-Eye Gazette. A few years later, the Harrises, a wealthy Kansas family, added it to their collection of midwestern dailies.

The Harrises encouraged editorial independence; they didn’t hover. They wanted The Hawk Eye to be local. The paper’s reporters wrote about the boys from nearby towns who went to fight the Nazis, and the Vietnam War protest at the Des Moines County courthouse.

The Hawk Eye had influence: John McCormally, who edited the paper in the 1960s and ’70s, was the first editor in Iowa, and probably in the country, to endorse Jimmy Carter for president, a move that contributed to Carter’s victory in the Iowa caucuses. By the time my parents moved to town in the early 1980s, The Hawk Eye had already won Best Newspaper in Iowa three times, Alison told me. My parents took out a subscription, and followed along as Hawk Eye reporters covered big regional stories: the murder of Mount Pleasant Mayor Edd King; the 500-year flood of 1993; the 500-year flood of 2008; the 2015 killing of a woman named Autumn Steele, who was accidentally shot by a police officer and whose death led to a years-long fight between the newspaper and the Burlington Police Department to make police records public. There were smaller items, too. A year before the grain-elevator explosion, The Hawk Eye covered Gloria Estefan leading the world’s longest conga line at the Steamboat Days festival. In 2002, Harrison Ford flew his helicopter to town and spent the night at a Burlington hotel. Asked how he liked chicken lips—a local restaurant staple—he told The Hawk Eye that they were just “OK.”

As a kid, I liked the opinion pages best. I devoured Sweet’s columns about global warming and the Iraq War. In sixth grade, I started writing letters to the editor about the rampant alcohol consumption at the water park, the lackadaisical recycling program at my school, the cruel treatment of the fish in the aquariums at Walmart. Each letter, printed in the op-ed section, included my name and my age: “By Elaine Godfrey, 12.”

Over the years, my parents became friendly with Sweet. Once, during dinner at his house, he made me promise that I’d never be a reporter. The pay was terrible, he said, and the future of journalism wasn’t looking so great. I swore that I wouldn’t.

In late April, I pulled up in my rental car to the Burlington Amtrak station, situated just off Main Street, only a few hundred yards from The Hawk Eye’s offices. The depot overlooks the Mississippi River. Sometimes bald eagles fly by carrying fish. Dale Alison and a few other former staffers who had been meeting at the station occasionally for coffee during the pandemic met me there, including Sweet and the onetime business editor Rex Troute. I brought a box of Casey’s doughnuts and we talked about the paper’s slow death while trains packed with coal and grain rattled by.

The collapse of Iowa’s oldest newspaper, they told me, began with a staff-wide announcement in November 2016: A publishing company called GateHouse, run by an investment firm in New York, was the buyer. GateHouse had already bought 121 daily papers, 316 weeklies, and 117 supermarket circulars across the country. It was a good time for gobbling up newspapers: Companies could buy them cheap, centralize resources, and slash staff to make a profit. But GateHouse reassured them that things would not change much in the newsroom. “You have a great legacy here. We want to keep that going,” a GateHouse editor told the staff. “GateHouse buys papers to make communities better.”

[Read: The Constitution doesn’t work without local news]

After three months, Sweet retired. Steve Delaney, who had become the paper’s publisher, was fired in April 2017. Alison, by then the managing editor, was let go in June, along with several others. Rex Troute retired then, too. The copy desk took buyouts that summer, and their duties were moved to Austin, Texas. Over the next two years, more reporters accepted buyouts, most of the paper’s advertising roles were eliminated, the six-person press crew was dissolved, and printing operations were moved to Peoria. In 2019, GateHouse bought USA Today publisher Gannett and took its more well-known name. At the time, Gannett owned more than 100 daily papers, and after the merger, the company owned one out of every six newspapers in the country. The Hawk Eye, which started 2016 with 100 people on the payroll, today has about a dozen. From the depot, the newspaper veterans and I had a decent view of the boxy brown Hawk Eye office. Gannett had put the building up for sale last winter.

Readers noticed the paper’s sloppiness first—how there seemed to be twice as many typos as before, and how sometimes the articles would end mid-sentence instead of continuing after the jump. The newspaper’s remaining reporters are overworked; there are local stories they’d like to tell but don’t have the bandwidth to cover. The Hawk Eye’s current staff is facing the impossible task of keeping a historic newspaper alive while its owner is attempting to squeeze it dry.

None of this was inevitable: At the time of the sale to GateHouse, The Hawk Eye wasn’t struggling financially. Far from it. In the years leading up to the sale, the paper was seeing profit margins ranging from the mid-teens to the high 20s. Gannett has dedicated much of its revenue to servicing and paying off loans associated with the merger, rather than reinvesting in local journalism. Which is to say that southeastern Iowans are losing their community paper not because it was a failing business, but because a massive media-holding company has investors to please and debts to pay. (A Gannett representative acknowledged that the company has prioritized repaying its creditors, but said that it is committed to supporting local journalism.)

I thought about the consequences of the paper’s decline when I visited the cluttered archives room at the Burlington Public Library this summer. Rhonda Frevert, a librarian who writes a monthly column for The Hawk Eye, reminded me that the paper is more than a guide to local happenings: It’s a repository of community knowledge. People come to search the archives for birth announcements, obituaries, stories about their families, and businesses that used to be in town. When those stories aren’t written, they’re not kept anywhere. There’s no record.

For the past several decades, The Hawk Eye’s owners donated bound copies of the newspaper to the library on a regular basis. Suddenly, three years ago, they stopped; the new owners were no longer providing that service. The library's archives simply end in January 2019, the last of the paper’s physical record marked by a thin metal bookend.

In early spring, I joined a Facebook group called “Burlington (IOWA) Breaking News reports and MORE” and realized that many of my high-school classmates were already members. So were my mom and most of her friends. The group has more than 16,000 people in it—more than triple the number of people who subscribe to The Hawk Eye. It’s ostensibly a site for sharing news about the community, but the page is chaotic. Scroll down and you’ll find mug shots of tattooed men alongside pictures of missing dogs, ads for rib eyes at Fareway, and comments accidentally made in all caps. I found more of the same in other Facebook groups, including “Greater Burlington IA Uncensored Chat” and “Greater Burlington (Iowa) Neighborhood Chatter.”

The pages can be a useful resource, and a good source of community jokes and gossip. But speculation and rumor run rampant. A member might ask about a new building going up in town, and someone will guess that it will be an Olive Garden. It never is. When a member hears something that sounds like gunshots nearby, she’ll post about it, and others will offer theories about the source. Once, I read a thread about an elementary-school principal suddenly skipping town. Some thought he might have behaved inappropriately with a student; one person said he’d been involved with a student’s mother; another swore they’d seen security-camera footage of the principal slashing tires in a parking lot at night. I checked The Hawk Eye and other outlets, but I couldn’t find verification of any of those stories.

Alison is a member of “Burlington Breaking News,” and all of the guessing is hard for him to watch. He often interjects in the comments to correct false information. Sometimes he posts news himself. “The stop light at Gear Avenue and Agency Street isn't expected to be working until spring,” he announced late last winter. People want to know what’s going on, Alison told me; they just don’t know how to find the answer, whom to call, where to look. That’s what reporters are for.

In the absence of local coverage, all news becomes national news: Instead of reading about local policy decisions, people read about the blacklisting of Dr. Seuss books. Instead of learning about their own local candidates, they consume angry takes about Marjorie Taylor Greene. Tom Courtney, a Democrat and four-term former state senator from Burlington, made more than 10,000 phone calls to voters during his 2020 run for office. In those calls, he heard something he never had before: “People that live in small-town rural Iowa [said] they wouldn’t vote for me or any Democrat because I’m in the same party as AOC,” Courtney told me. “Where did they get that? Not local news!” Courtney lost in November.

It’s difficult to quantify that creeping sense of disconnection, those crumbling social ties. But southeastern Iowans feel it, and they’ll describe it if you ask them to. Within hours of posting in “Burlington Breaking News” to ask for people’s thoughts on The Hawk Eye, I received dozens of comments, emails, and private Facebook messages. Almost everyone expressed sadness about the paper’s deterioration. “We feel like we’re all little islands out here,” Deb Bowen, a 72-year-old Burlington resident, told me on the phone.

Jon Billups, the city’s current mayor, worked as The Hawk Eye’s circulation director after closing his family’s tire shop. But GateHouse fired him in 2017. Since the purchase of the paper, he’s noticed a growing negative self-image among residents, he told me. Fewer people see Burlington as a nice place to live; they seem to like their neighbors less. “We’re struggling with not having [this] iconic thing.” As mayor, he helped start a newsletter to keep residents updated on city projects. “It’s a matter of time before our local paper does not exist,” he told me.

[Read: Can the news be fixed?]

In 2018, Hawk Eye alumnus Jeff Abell founded a new online newspaper called the Burlington Beacon to help fill the void, and soon brought on another former Hawk Eye reporter, William Smith. They post articles straight to Facebook and have launched a weekly print edition for subscribers. But the Beacon is far from profitable. Until recently, Abell paid Smith from his own pocket. The two work out of Abell’s comic-book store in downtown Burlington. At the depot, I asked Alison what he thought about the Beacon’s prospects. “Jeff and Will are doing their best,” he said. “But doggone it, it would take 150 years to build up what they had here.”

Last fall, a man named Gary posted on the “Burlington Breaking News” page, asking: “Anyone know what is going to be built at Broadway and Division south of the Girl Scout office?” A construction crew had recently broken ground at the site. People in the Facebook group started to weigh in: Maybe it’ll be a new sandwich joint; that’d be nice. Maybe a coffee shop, or a Dollar Tree, or another bank. Someone had heard that it might be a dentist’s office. One of the page’s moderators suggested that perhaps it was a new spec building that would soon be put up for sale. Then the thread ended. The Hawk Eye never ran a story about the new building. Soon, the post was forgotten, buried under a mounting pile of questions from other southeastern Iowans wondering what, exactly, was going on in town.

Anne Imhofs Stylish (and Shareable) Provocations   25%

The German artist shot to art-world fame with a performance at the Venice Biennale that captivated social media. Her latest work looks sure to please a smartphone-wielding audience, too.

The doctor who treated Hitler's hysterical blindness  

Hitler’s affliction after World War I and the doctor who treated him star in a 1939 novel by Ernst Weiss, a Jewish physician and writer whose works – praised by the likes of Kafka – only recently got their due in Israel

Food and death: A look at the tasty and tearful tradition of Jewish mourning  

Eggs, lentils and bagels are just some of the ways Jewish communities mark periods of mourning like Tisha B’Av

In a rocky Israeli crater, scientists simulate life on Mars  

Afghan children in South Korea welcome new life away from war and restrictions   33%

A group of Afghan children, who were part of almost 400 people evacuated to South Korea in August, on Wednesday shared their relief of being able to enjoy life with their families in a new country away from war and restrictions.“In Afghanistan, you can’t do activities as freely as men do,” one young girl told reporters after a taekwondo class on Wednesday. “It’s satisfying to do taekwondo without a hijab in Korea right now.”A boy at the class said he had never known a war-free life until his…

Belfast review Kenneth Branaghs euphoric eulogy to his home city   28%

Nightmarishness meets nostalgia as Jamie Dornan and Judi Dench star in a scintillating Troubles-era coming-of-age tale

There is a terrific warmth and tenderness to Kenneth Branagh’s elegiac, autobiographical movie about the Belfast of his childhood: spryly written, beautifully acted and shot in a lustrous monochrome, with set pieces, madeleines and epiphanies that feel like a more emollient version of Terence Davies. Some may feel that the film is sentimental or that it does not sufficiently conform to the template of political anger and despair considered appropriate for dramas about Northern Ireland and the Troubles. And yes, there is certainly a spoonful of sugar (or two) in the mix, with some mandatory Van Morrison on the soundtrack. There’s a key climactic scene about how you disarm a gunman in the middle of a riot if you have no gun yourself, which has to be charitably indulged.

But this film has such emotional generosity and wit and it tackles a dilemma of the times not often understood: when, and if, to pack up and leave Belfast? Is it an understandable matter of survival or an abandonment of your beloved home town to the extremists? (Full disclosure: my own dad left Belfast for England, though well before the era of this film.)

How scammers are trapping those who are hunting for jobs   50%

As more people wanted to work from home, the door opened to even more job scams, according to a report by the Better Business Bureau.

Commercial vs. Literary Writing, Cozy Mysteries and Other Letters to the Editor  

Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.

IISc working on Corridrone as India opens up to drone use  

The Books Briefing: The Fight Over What Kids Can Read   6%

After the Capitol riot, Matt Hawn, a teacher from Tennessee, brought an Atlantic essay to class for his students to analyze: “The First White President,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Earlier the class had discussed a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin; later in the year, they watched a performance of Kyla Jenée Lacey’s poem “White Privilege.” Hawn told my colleague Emma Green that he didn’t have an ideological bent in choosing these works; he merely wanted students to evaluate their claims. “For a lot of my students, this is the first time they’re getting the opportunity to even assess something like that,” he said. Before the end of the school year, Hawn was fired. (He’s since appealed his termination; representatives from his school district declined Green’s request for comment on the incident but emphasized in his hearing that they don’t condone racism.)

Hawn’s firing comes at a time when many legislatures—Tennessee’s included—are moving to ban critical race theory in schools. These debates rely on what the Atlantic contributing writer Ibram X. Kendi (whose book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You has also been censored) argues is an imagined conservative idea of the concept that ignores how those who developed it actually define it. States such as Texas have taken specific aim at Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, a searing New York Times report arguing that slavery is central to our country’s founding. As my colleague Adam Harris writes, these bans and proposed bans “would effectively prevent public schools and universities from holding discussions about racism.”

This moment may be particularly dangerous for students’ intellectual freedom, but restricting what kids read is nothing new. Take Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which has been targeted for its depiction of child abuse. Keeping that work out of children’s hands also keeps readers from what Morrison herself calls a depiction of one of “those most vulnerable, most undescribed, not taken seriously little Black girls.” Another book, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, was banned for its use of racial slurs and a “white savior” protagonist. Adults may be right to question its portrayal of race, but when the book is taught well, young people can join in reevaluating the legacy of the novel’s much adored, though deeply flawed protagonist—work that Lee herself did in the sequel, Go Set a Watchman. More recently, censorship of Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give has shut kids out of discussions about the deeply personal hurt of police brutality.

It’s no accident that these works consider issues such as race, gender, and disability; a whopping 52 percent of banned or challenged books from 2006 to 2016 included “diverse content.” Rather than protecting children, this practice harms those who are already marginalized by spreading a message that their lives are dangerous and inappropriate, the professor Paul Ringel argued in The Atlantic. Only by encouraging students to discuss difference can we empower them to find self-understanding and acceptance.

​Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

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What We’re Reading

Matt Hawn; The Atlantic

He taught a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay. Then he was fired.

“I believe my kids can handle this difficult subject material. It does them a great service academically.”

📚 “The First White President,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Raquel Zaldivar / Chicago Tribune / Getty / The Atlantic

Why conservatives want to cancel the 1619 Project

“The work of [Nikole] Hannah-Jones and others suggests ... that present-day inequalities have been shaped by deliberate political and policy choices. What appears to be an argument about reexamining history is also an argument about ideology—a defense of the legitimacy of the existing social order against an account of its historical origins that suggests different policy choices could produce a more equitable society.”

📚 “The 1619 Project,” by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Deborah Feingold / Corbis / Getty

Remembering the peerless Toni Morrison

“Since the publication of her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970, Morrison has been established as one of the most powerful and distinct voices in literature, a lyrical chronicler and witness to the African American experience.”

📚 The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Go set a legacy: the fate of Harper Lee

“Will [Lee] be remembered for Jurist Atticus, or Racist Atticus? Will she be remembered as the author of a book so beloved, and so revered, and so culturally dilute, that it seems wrong to call it simply a ‘book’? Or as the author of the work that complicates Mockingbird’s tidy vision of right and wrong?”

📚 To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
📚 Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee

Balzer + Bray / HarperCollins

The Hate U Give enters the ranks of great YA novels

“[Angie] Thomas’s debut novel offers an incisive and engrossing perspective of the life of a Black teenage girl as [the protagonist] Starr’s two worlds converge over questions of police brutality, justice, and activism.”

📚 The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura.

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Hayley Wickenheiser shares lessons from sports, life in new book Over the Boards   13%

Biden's big bet on testing races against demand   6%

Commercial labs may have to plug some of the gap, along with health professionals who can administer other types of tests, like point-of-care antigen tests that have quick turnarounds.

Op-Ed: Attacks on school board meetings are threatening democracy. Will educators help save it?  

In a national survey, principals — in conservative and liberal settings — say they're likely to support civic education that could shore up democracy.

My new lover takes my breath away. However, I feel a sense of dread. How do I stop this?   11%

It is hard to loosen the tentacles that dread wraps around the mind, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith, the goal is to live on despite them

I am a 50-year-old queer woman, embarking on a new relationship after leaving my previous partner of eight years. My new lover is beautiful, smart, insightful, passionate and she actually takes my breath away. We have been dating for about three months. I like what we have and I am extremely fond of her. However, I find myself catastrophising our relationship.

I feel a sense of dread a lot of the time and suspect that there is a part of me that might be self-sabotaging us, based on the belief that she will eventually break my heart. I don’t know how to stop this. I just want to enjoy the relationship, instead of being constantly worried and jumping to the worst conclusions about our future.

After an ill wind, some good   10%

Paul Connolly’s Kitchen Sink Drama is a slice of domestic life, captured masterfully in only 100 words. This week, calm after stirring winds.

Has England gone back to the office?  

Ever since the order to work from home was lifted, workers in England have been heading back to the office – but mostly only a few days a week. Joanna Partridge looks at whether work will ever be the same again

In July the government lifted its advice that people in England should work from home wherever possible. It ended a phase of the pandemic that for many has meant doing their jobs remotely with video conferences instead of meetings, and no water-cooler chat.

But while the daily commute has returned for many, it is not everyone and not every day. Instead a new form of hybrid working has emerged as a popular alternative: half a week in the office and half at home. But it is not working for everyone: for businesses such as coffee shops that rely on busy town centres five days a week, hybrid working means more lost business. Last week the prime minister suggested in his party conference speech that Britain needs a further push to get back to the office full-time.

Cursed for Life? Not So Fast, Say Alice Hoffmans Witches   50%

In “The Book of Magic,” a family is determined to break a centuries-old spell.

Lenny Henry on stopping school bullies with jokes  

The hero in Lenny Henry’s new kids’ book is bullied before he saves the world – and Henry reveals he was bullied too, but used humour as a shield.

Gorillas delivery service fires back over workers' strike   -10%

After a series of protests at the groceries delivery service, Gorillas workers claim working conditions have only gotten worse. But the company is sending a clear message to dissatisfied workers — strikers will be fired.